Daily Archives: December 17, 2014

President Obama and then Secretary of State Clinton decided that America has a critical shortage of banksters and decided to import some from Ecuador. The banksters showed their gratitude by showing the Democratic Party with “donations.” Sometimes a small story reveals the core truth of large public policy issues far better than the big overall story can. The New York Times has just published an article entitled “Ecuador Family Wins Favors After Donations to Democrats.” The short-version is that Obama has decided to give what amounts to asylum to a family from Ecuador after it made large campaign donations to Democrats.

“It was one of several favorable decisions the Obama administration made in recent years involving the Isaías family, which the government of Ecuador accuses of buying protection from Washington and living comfortably in Miami off the profits of a looted bank in Ecuador.

I just came across a very interesting bit of research, A Guide to Paradigmatic Self-Marginalization: Lessons for Post-Keynesian Economists by Leonhard Dobusch and Jakob Kapeller; you can find it here.

I realize this is not going to be of interest to many of our readers, as it is a sort of “inside the halls of academia” analysis. What the authors do is to look at the strategies of editors running the top orthodox and the top heterodox journals in economics. Actually it might be a bit unfair to label these strategies, as the authors do not mean to imply that editorial policy knowingly pursues the strategies. Instead, the article looks at the ex post results.

In a nutshell, what they find is that the articles published in orthodox journals do not cite the research published in heterodox journals. NO SURPRISE THERE! But they also find some startling self-defeating practices pursued by heterodox journals.

On June 20, 2012 the UK Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, Lord Sassoon of Ashley Park gave a speech to the British Bankers Association – the group the U.S. government (i.e., the FDIC) found to have helped organize the world’s largest price rigging cartel and fraud in the form of rigging Libor. The financial crisis occurred under the “new” neo-liberal Labour when its championing of the three “de’s” – financial deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization – combined with modern executive and professional compensation and the effective elimination of “joint and several liability” to make the City of London the most criminogenic environment in the world for financial “control frauds.” Naturally, the Tories have decided that the answer to this disaster is to double-down on Labour’s embrace of the three “de’s.” Indeed, the first words in Lord Sassoon’s prepared speech were “Thank you Philip [Hampton].”